Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  146. Andy Greenberg, “Google’s Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring ISIS Recruits,” Wired, September 7, 2016; email from Jared Cohen, “Re: Following-up on the digital counter-insurgency,” August 13, 2015, WikiLeaks, John Podesta Email Archive.

  147. A good roundup of overlap between JigSaw and the State Department was compiled by the Google Transparency Project. “Google’s Support for Hillary Clinton,” November 28, 2016.

  148. Email from Jared Cohen, “Syria,” July 25, 2012, WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton Email Archive. “Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from… which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen wrote Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state William Joseph Burns in a 2012 email.

  149. As Julian Assange wryly noted in When Google Met WikiLeaks, “If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like [JigSaw], it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.” Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014).

  150. Yazan al-Saadi, “StratforLeaks: Google Ideas Director Involved in ‘Regime Change,’” Al-Akhbar English, March 14, 2012; Doug Bolton, “Google Planned to Help Syria Rebels to Bring Down Assad Regime, Leaked Hillary Clinton Emails Claim,” The Independent, March 22, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk /life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-syria-rebels-defection-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks-a6946121.html.

  151. Fred Burton was referring to information he got from a Google executive about Jared Cohen’s plan to visit the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Turkey as part of his plan to “engage the Iranian community to better understand the challenges faced by Iranians as part of one of our Google Ideas groups on repressive societies.” Burton’s email was just one in a series of letters that referred to Jared Cohen and JigSaw (Google Ideas) as possibly engaging in veiled “regime change” operations—from Iran to Egypt, Syria, and Libya. The emails were leaked following the penetration of Stratfor’s servers by a group that called itself Anonymous. “On Saturday, hackers who say they are members of the collective known as Anonymous claimed responsibility for crashing the Web site of the group, Stratfor Global Intelligence Service, and pilfering its client list, e-mails and credit card information in an operation they say is intended to steal $1 million for donations to charity,” reported the New York Times in December 2011. “Hackers Breach the Web Site of Stratfor Global Intelligence,” New York Times, December 25, 2011.

  152. Andy Greenberg, “Inside Google’s Internet Justice League and Its AI-Powered War on Trolls,” Wired, September 19, 2016.

  153. Richard Waters, “FT Interview with Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page,” Financial Times, October 31, 2014.

  154. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen saw the role of technology companies as taking over the traditional functions of governments. “Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. This is not to suggest that connection technologies are going to transform the world alone. But they offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world,” the pair explained in The New Digital Age, a book they cowrote. They didn’t really see a difference between government and Google. They saw all these parts—entertainment, search, office products, military contracting, fighting terrorism, policing—as part of a bigger whole, working together for mutual benefit. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

  155. Richard Waters, “Google Eyes Better City Life for Billions,” Financial Times, June 11, 2015.

  156. Matt Novak, “Google’s Parent Company (Probably) Wants to Build a City from Scratch,” Gizmodo, April 5, 2016, http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/google-s-parent-company-probably-wants-to-build-a-cit-1769181473.

  157. Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive and a connected-device guru who works as a personal adviser to Larry Page, sketched one vision of a future where Google’s technology benevolently ruled over and mediated everything and everyone in the world. “Tomorrow’s Internet will be everywhere and in everything. It will draw on massive amounts of data to augment our own intelligence. And it will help us make better decisions—from avoiding dangerous drug interactions to diagnosing illnesses to deciding when water skiing might not be the best idea.… Finally, the Internet of the future will go from doing things when we ask to doing things before we ask.” He then drew on a personal story of how he tore his hamstring while waterskiing to illustrate how a ubiquitous Google could be used to predict and prevent harm. “In the case of my water-skiing accident, my smartphone could have combined existing information… to predict that I was considering water skiing, calculate the odds of my getting injured, and advise me against it before I even got in the water. Or, if I was stubborn enough to do it anyway, a computer controlling the boat’s throttle could have prevented the engine from pulling me too hard.” Who would write the rules and laws in this hyperconnected future? How would people make their voices heard? Who would own all those sensors and controllers embedded in our hamstrings and boats? Fadell didn’t address these issues. His vision seemed to take for granted that this new world would be kind and safe. Tony Fadell, “Nest CEO Tony Fadell on the Future of the Internet,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2015.

  Chapter 6

  1. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras, “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations,” Guardian, June 11, 2013.

  2. Ewen MacAskill, “Edward Snowden, NSA Files Source: ‘If They Want to Get You, in Time They Will,’” Guardian, June 10, 2013.

  3. David T. Z. Mindich, “Lincoln’s Surveillance State,” New York Times, July 5, 2013.

  4. “They stressed that the system did not perform any actual surveillance, but rather was designed to use data which had been collected in ‘the real world’ to help build predictive models which might warn when civil disturbances were imminent,” writes Ford Rowan, the NBC correspondent who broke the ARPANET spying story. Ford Rowan, Technospies (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 55.

  5. K. Babe Howell, “Gang Policing: The Post Stop-and-Frisk Justification for Profile-Based Policing,” University of Denver Criminal Law Review 5 (2015), http://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=cl_pubs; Ben Popper, “How the NYPD Is Using Social Media to Put Harlem Teens behind Bars,” The Verge, December 10, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/10/7341077 /nypd-harlem-crews-social-media-rikers-prison.

  6. “Police in Md. Using Social Media Facial Recognition to Track Suspects,” CBS Baltimore, October 19, 2016, http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2016/10/18/police-in-md-using-social-media-facial-recognition-to-track-suspects/.

  7. CI Publishing, homepage, accessed May 1, 2017, https://gumroad.com/cipublishing.

  8. From the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security, in one way or another, every federal security agency tapped “open source” Internet data to carry out its mission. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security routinely used social media for investigating people applying for American citizenship. “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.… Once a user posts online, they create a public record and timeline of their activities. In essence, using MySpace and other like sites is akin to doing an unannounced cyber ‘site-visit’ on petitioners and beneficiaries.” “Social Networking Sites and Their Importance to FDN,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services, obtained via Freedom of Information Act by EFF, July 2010.

  9. “We’re looking at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” Doug Naquin, director of the Open Source Center, said in 2007. “We’re looking at chat rooms and things that didn’t exist five yea
rs ago, and trying to stay ahead.… A lot more is digital, and a lot more is online. It’s also a lot more social. Interaction is a much bigger part of media and news than it used to be.” “Remarks by Doug Naquin, Director, Open Source Center, CIRA Luncheon, 3 October 2007,” Central Intelligence Retirees Association Newsletter CCCII, no. 4 (Winter 2007), https://fas.org/irp/eprint/naquin.pdf.

  10. “Establishment of the DNI Open Source Center,” Central Intelligence Agency, November 8, 2005, https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/press-release-archive-2005/pr11082005.html.

  11. Lee Fang, “The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos,” The Intercept, April 14, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14 /in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/.

  12. Gerry Smith, “How Police Are Scanning All of Twitter to Detect Terrorist Threats,” Huffington Post, June 25, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/25 /dataminr-mines-twitter-to_n_5507616.html.

  13. In 2014, police departments all across the country used it. Indeed, at the same time that Oakland was trying to push through the Domain Awareness Center, the city’s police department purchased a Geofeedia license and used it to monitor protests, including the Black Lives Matter movement. “Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color,” warned the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained a copy of Geofeedia’s marketing materials to law enforcement. “We know for a fact that in Oakland and Baltimore, law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests.” Matt Cagle, “Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target Activists of Color,” ACLU, October 11, 2016, https://www.aclunc.org/blog /facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed-target.

  14. “Usage Overview,” Geofeedia (company promotional materials obtained by the ACLU, September 2016).

  15. Following the ACLU’s exposure of Geofeedia’s police contracting work, Facebook and other Internet companies announced that they cut the company off from access to their data. But other similar companies continue to proliferate. “Social Media Surveillance Is Growing in the Wake of Geofeedia’s Demise,” MuckRock, May 17, 2017, https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/may/17 /social-media-surveillance-growing/.

  16. Noah Shachtman, “Air Force’s Top Brain Wants a Social Radar to See into Hearts and Minds,” Wired, January 19, 2012; Mark T. Maybury, “Social Radar for Smart Power,” MITRE Corporation, April 2010, https://www.mitre.org/publications /technical-papers/social-radar-for-smart-power. Just like the radar air defense systems, whose ultimate goal is to scramble jets or fire missiles to intercept hostile aircraft before they have time to inflict damage, the Internet-based predictive systems were also aimed at heading off threats. As Mark Maybury, who headed the US Air Force’s Social Radar project, explained in 2010: the physical “intercept” component of human radar systems would sometimes be direct physical action—like missile strikes—but at other times it would be social and psychological. Rather than force, it would be a nudge and a push that would guide people in the right direction. “While hard power will always play a key role in warfare, increasingly soft power, the ability to not coerce but to encourage or motivate behavior, will be necessary in the future of our increasingly connected and concentrated global village,” he wrote. Maybury, “Social Radar for Smart Power.”

  17. George I. Seffers, “Decoding the Future for National Security,” Signal, December 1, 2015, http://www.afcea.org/content/?q=Article-decoding-future-national-security; “Anticipatory Intelligence,” IARPA, accessed April 16, 2017, https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/about-iarpa/anticipatory-intelligence; Katie Drummond, “Spies Want to Stockpile Your YouTube Clips,” Wired, June 11, 2010.

  18. Noah Shachtman, “Pentagon Forecast: Cloudy, 80% Chance of Riots,” Wired, September 11, 2007.

  19. “It’s now being used by various parts of the government. We’ve had good success at forecasting different types of unrest and different sorts of motivations for that unrest,” a Lockheed Martin manager said in 2015. He explained that the system was constantly evolving and being trained to predict future events in as much detail as possible—not just whether there would be an uprising but also the exact week and the number of people involved. Sandra Jontz, “Data Analytics Programs Help Predict Global Unrest,” Signal, December 1, 2015, https://www.afcea.org/content/?q=node/15501/.

  20. James Risen and Laura Poitras, “N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens,” New York Times, September 28, 2013. Actually, the NSA mostly sticks to planning and funding, while much of the actual building is done by private military contractors and Silicon Valley itself. Tim Shorrock, “How Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSA,” The Nation, May 27, 2015.

  21. David Burnham, “The Silent Power of the N.S.A.,” New York Times, March 27, 1983.

  22. Transcripts of Ford Rowan’s June 1975 NBC broadcasts were read into the Congressional Record. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 4–9.

  23. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 134, 234; Matt Novak, “A History of Internet Spying, Part 2,” Gizmodo, February 20, 2015, http://gizmodo.com/a-history-of-internet-spying-part-2-1686760364.

  24. The NSA was also involved in ARPANET development in other ways. For instance: in 1975, the NSA worked with Vinton Cerf on a classified project to design a “fully secured internet system” based on the ARPANET. Oral History of Vinton (Vint) Cerf, Interviewed by Donald Nielson (Mountain View, CA: Computer History Museum, November 7, 2007), 20, http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/04/102658186-05-01-acc.pdf.

  25. The NSA even grabbed users’ targeted advertising data—age, gender, household income, marital status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, political alignment—that was being compiled and transmitted by what agency analysts mockingly described as “leaky” mobile apps, including addictive kids’ games like Angry Birds. Larson, Glanz, and Lehren, “Spy Agencies Probe Angry Birds.”

  26. Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, “NSA Infiltrates Links to Yahoo, Google Data Centers Worldwide, Snowden Documents Say,” Washington Post, October 20, 2013. As the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani explained: “The operation to infiltrate data links exploits a fundamental weakness in systems architecture. To guard against data loss and system slowdowns, Google and Yahoo maintain fortresslike data centers across four continents and connect them with thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable.… For the data centers to operate effectively, they synchronize large volumes of information about account holders. Yahoo’s internal network, for example, sometimes transmits entire e-mail archives—years of messages and attachments—from one data center to another.”

  27. “NSA Slides Explain the PRISM Data-Collection Program,” Washington Post, June 6, 2013.

  28. Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, “U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program,” Washington Post, June 7, 2013.

  29. Barton Gellman and Todd Lindeman, “Inner Workings of a Top-Secret Spy Program,” Washington Post, June 29, 2013.

  30. Shane Harris, “Meet the Spies Doing the NSA’s Dirty Work,” Foreign Policy, November 21, 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/11/21/meet-the-spies-doing-the-nsas-dirty-work/.

  31. Gellman and Lindeman, “Inner Workings of a Top-Secret Spy Program.”

  32. Ibid.

  33. “NSA Prism Program Slides,” Guardian, November 1, 2013.

  34. Gellman and Poitras, “U.S., British Intelligence Mining.”

  35. Given the limited set of Snowden documents that have been made public so far, it is not clear whether programs like MUSCULAR and PRISM were ultimately connected to other advanced Internet monitoring and prediction systems run by the US government—systems like Lockheed Martin’s “World-Wide Integ
rated Crisis Early Warning System”—designed to function like advanced warning radar for dangerous human behavior. To date, only a fraction of Snowden’s NSA cache has been made public. The full Snowden set is controlled by a single news organization, The Intercept, which is owned by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

  36. Sam Jewler, Mission Creep-y: Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire (Washington, DC: Public Citizen, November 2014), https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/google-political-spending-mission-creepy.pdf.

  37. “Google CEO Larry Page: NSA Actions Threaten Democracy,” YouTube video, 2:27, from CBS This Morning, televised March 20, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE99DtJmyaA.

  38. Claire Cain Miller, “Revelations of N.S.A. Spying Cost U.S. Tech Companies,” New York Times, March 21, 2014.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Google Inc., Security and Exchange Commission, Form S-3, August 18, 2005, 12, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505170553 /ds3.htm.

  41. Joe Mullin, “In 2009, Ed Snowden Said Leakers ‘Should Be Shot.’ Then He Became One,” Ars Technica, June 26, 2013, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009-ed-snowden-said-leakers-should-be-shot-then-he-became-one/.

  42. Edward Snowden, interview with Hubert Siebel on ARD (German television channel), January 26, 2014, transcript at https://edwardsnowden.com/2014/01/27/video-ard-interview-with-edward-snowden/.